When your only tool is the bottom half of a percolator, everything tends to look like a thumbtack

Time for some home improvements.  My room here is equipped with some generous loft space, so I decided to make use of it as a bedroom.  Lucas and I moved my bed up there, and I got some curtains from Ikea to hang from the railings.  Naturally, the curtains needed a little trimming and then to be secured in place, but our apartment is a little thin on tools.  Fortunately, the bottom half of my percolator is pretty dense (ie works as a hammer), we have a chopping knife and a cutting board (perfect from trimming curtains), and thumbtacks are cheap at Tesco.  In my opinion, the results aren't bad.

 

The modified loft

The handiwork.  Complete with rolled hems.

A few miscellaneous Hungarian things before I go.  First, one of my favorite Hungarian objects, the 100 forint coin.

A pretty coin, plus the perfect size and weight.... kind of like a big, fat nickle.

Second, I picked up a set of four little brushed stainless steel bowls from Ikea (where I indeed ate meatballs for dinner every night since Tuesday.  The 100 forint deal, however, is now over, so my appetite for meatballs is sated and will remain so for a good while.).  These bowls were, again, an ideal little bit of metal.  Just an object with the right weight, size, heft about it.  They're fairly useless except for holding a few coins or maybe a spice or condiment, but the price was right and if nothing else, they'll make fair decor.  Anyhow, I'm mentioning these because they have an interesting property:  if you spin them with the curved side down, eventually they get off-balance, spin on an edge, and then very reliably tip over and fall flat-side down.  This takes no special effort to get them off balance; just set one a-spinning and every time it will tip over.  To wit:

Finally, I went with a group of BSM students today to Városliget (City Park) for the annual outdoor festival celebrating the Mangalitsa pig.  This breed is a woolly, fatty pig which was developed as a cross-breed in Serbia and Hungary in the early 1800s.  The real Hungarian spelling is Mangalica, as the Hungarian "c" is pronounced like an English "ts," like in "its."  The New York Times has a good article on the Mangalitsa pig and its return to favor in American cuisine.

The festival was outdoors and had tons of booths selling Hungarian knick-knacks and treats.  There was a booth selling 30 or 40 different types of jam, and I bought jars of elderberry and quince jams (for you, Mom).  Also, a number of stalls sold delicious marzipan (also on display:  a half-scale marzipan pig).  We tried some of the sausage and the pork stew, both of which were wonderful, fresh, and appropriately fatty.  Anyhow, snow (and its dreaded cousin, slush) has returned to Budapest, and as I often like to joke before a cold track workout, it sure feels like hog-killin' weather.